The biologists were rocking and rolling in the wet lab for more than 12 hours straight last night, processing 5 incredibly diverse trawls! The more diverse and/or the larger the catch the longer the processing takes: sorting by species (cleaning off any mud or hagfish slime), removing tissue samples for isotoping, labeling everything, and then preserving the animals in formalin or ethanol for subsequent verification and follow-up processing in the lab. Highlights of the night included lots of hagfish (how DO they make that much slime?!?!), a batfish, two monkfish, three different anemone species, zoanthids, nudibranchs, and a snipe eel.

Don’t eat that James! It isn’t spaghetti, it’s a snipe eel!

One of my personal favorites was a fish I nicknamed “the blob” because it looks like part jellyfish (with a layer of clear muscle and skin surrounding a more opaque layer of muscle next to the vertebral column), the actual name is the Atlantic soft pout (Melanostigma atlanticum).